Diana Eliazov

Prince Jackson announced last night that the JFK security strike has been called off.

If you're planning on flying in or out of JFK over the next few days, the rumblings of an imminent strike by contracted security guards at the airport starting scheduled to start tomorrow might have given you some concern.

(Alternately, even if you weren't doing holiday flying, the idea that the people responsible for airport safety make poverty wages, don't get sick days, and often lack adequate training and equipment might also have given you some concern.)

Either way, you can breathe a little easier, as the security officers have announced that they're calling off the strike after the Port Authority intervened.

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Diana Eliazov

Prince Jackson is one of the airport security guards who voted to strike.

Employees of two security contractors at JFK airport voted this afternoon to go on strike December 20 if their employers don't come to the table and address at least some of their complaints.

The timing of the strike, near the peak of the holiday travel season, could seriously snarl traffic out of JFK. It would be difficult for the contractors, Air Serv and Global Elite, to hire replacement workers, since it can take weeks and months for required security checks to go through.

The employees aren't members of a union, but they are backed by the Service Employees International Union 32BJ.

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Diana Eliazov

Prince Jackson is a security guard at JFK's Delta terminals, where his employer, Air Serv, pays him $8 an hour.

A year after the Voice first wrote about the struggle of security guards at New York airports to earn a living wage, the guards are escalating their tactics.

Tomorrow at 2:30, roughly 300 security contractors at JFK will vote on whether to go on strike December 20th, just in time to completely scramble airport operations during the holiday rush.

Two hundred of the contractors work for Air Serv, a Georgia-based company owned by Frank Argenbright, a man with a long history of cutting corners in airport security. Argenbright started Air Serv in 2002, after his previous company, Argenbright Security, was effectively sunk by an impressively lengthy string of scandals -- culminating on the morning of September 11, 2001, when Argenbright employees waved through two soon-to-be plane hijackers even though they'd set off a metal detector.

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Well, this is heartening terrifying news for anyone who plans on traveling through JFK in the near future. A woman got through security in Terminal 5 with a dagger in her bag, the New York Post reported. Nope, TSA people, you weren't hallucinating à la Macbeth. It was an actual antique dagger, which the woman, 26-year-old Gabrielle Olsen of Washington Heights, told police was given to her by her father for protection.

And it's not like Olsen hadn't caught the TSA's eye. Before the TSA noticed the dagger they confiscated a bottle of liquid from Olsen. Then -- after she passed through the checkpoint -- they noticed the pointy thing on "a screening-machine X-ray."

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You know how annoying it is when you have to take off your shoes and your belt at the airport and then security touches you, and you just feel kind of uncomfortable? Well, Sen. Chuck Schumer feels your pain, and he hopes to make it a lot easier for passengers to complain.

With a new legislation proposal, Schumer is responding to some incidents that were actually a bit more serious than an uncomfortable touch. In December, three elderly women came forward with claims that they were strip-searched by Transportation Security Administration officers at JFK airport -- and recent reports allege that TSA officials have inappropriately harassed women passing through security.

Let's take Lenore Zimmerman, for example. She's a tiny, 85-year-old Long Island grandmother who says she was brought into a private room and forced to take off her clothes on her way to a flight to Fort Lauderdale.

Or Ruth Sherman, 88, who said that TSA agents made her strip so they could inspect her colostomy bag.

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It wasn't too long ago we brought you the latest report on how New York's airports suck. Well, today we have some more good news from the New York Times . The paper reports that the airspace that includes JFK, LaGuardia and Newark (as well as Jersey's Teterboro Airport and Philadelphia International Airport) "accounted for nearly half of all delays in the nation" in the first half of 2011. Meanwhile, those airports were only responsible for 12 percent of domestic flights. Yikes.

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Cohitre.com

We win! Once again, you guys! New York City airports are liked by few but used by many, which makes them generally problematic to all. According to Frommer's, and they know from travel, JFK is the worst of the worst, with La Guardia and Newark (which is, apparently, "dull" -- isn't that actually sort of good in an airport?) not doing too much better. Why so much airport haterade? Well...

All three major New York City airports are on this list, in large part because they're run by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a hideously mismanaged money sink that does a poor job of responding to air travelers' needs.

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Even though it's the most wonderful time of the year does not mean that any of us should lose even an iota of vigilance and dedication to the cause at hand which is, of course, our safety, and any inconvenience dedicated to such. Thus, while you might be getting ahead of things and purchasing all your gifts and even wrapping them, obsessive-compulsively and perfectly, as you do, the TSA is under no obligation to just leave the presents be, and might actually have to unwrap them if they seem slightly or majorly sketchy. However...you knew this already, right? This is the year 2011?

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UARS -- the 6-ton satellite that just maybe was going to hit you -- fell back to earth sometime between 11:23 p.m. Friday and 1:09 a.m. Saturday EDT, NASA has said. But even though it "penetrated the atmosphere" over the Pacific Ocean, when and where it exactly fell is still unknown, so let the conspiracy theories begin. If you do happen find one of the 26 pieces of UARS that were expected to have reached Earth, NASA says don't touch and call law enforcement. (Read: no souvenirs.) People in San Antonio, Texas and Hawaii have already reported seeing flying objects that could have been the satellite. [NASA, CNN]

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​At Newark airport, your  flight will rarely be on time. At JFK, your stuff might get stolen: according to the Post, larcenies at Kennedy Airport are up 30 percent from the first half of 2010 (the most commonly stolen items are laptops and iPads). Looks like we're all booking out of LaGuardia! But LaGuardia is where seven percent of the luggage scales are faulty, potentially increasing baggage costs, and also where you might undergo an invasive three-minute frisking by the TSA. Greyhound bus, anyone? More »